When faced with incoherence in an author’s lifework, one can interpret it either as deliberate resistance to definitive answers or as sloppy thinking.
Are we not heavily invested in rescuing authors from sloppy thinking?
This rescue is less about some writer or other’s reputation, it is a better understood as criticism’s vocational self-validation.
Kant defines art as purposiveness without a purpose. An artwork is definitely meaningful, but no definitive meaning can be derived from it. And there are as many interpretations of a book as there are readers of it, perspectives on a painting as there are onlookers and so on.
The purpose of criticism is to offer a well-founded interpretation of a work of art.
The purpose of criticism, therefore, is to offer a well-founded interpretation of something that is purposive without a purpose. Criticism cannot be the purpose of art, criticism delineates its purposiveness.
But by showing whereto it tends, criticism introduces purpose into art’s without purposiveness. In other words, it strips art of its ‘without.’
Criticism without art: not devoid of aristry but bordering, touching on its limits.
On the first lecture of my undergraduate degree I sat in front of two students who were quite annoyed as the lecturer informed us that we are expected to read a novel a week, some poetry, and critical material on top of that to meet the course requirements. And I remember being surprised that someone who dislikes reading would choose to study English Literature at university.
But still it is surely not too presumptuous to assume that most people who chose the subject do so out of a love of reading (certainly, they cannot do it for the career prospects). But what happens to this love of reading over time? Most of my academic reading is, quite frankly, rather dull. And the texts that I produce are no better. It has been so long since I read a text for the pure pleasure of reading that I yesterday intuitively concluded that entertainment and literature (properly understood) stand in opposition to one another. Whatever the point of literary writing is, it is definitely not to entertain. Conversely, texts that primarily seek to entertain thereby forfeit their claim on the holy grail of the Literary.
What kind of psychological uncertainty have I put to rest with the conclusion that reading is not fun, or ceases to be reading the moment it becomes fun?
(The difficulty of thinking is also worth thinking about).
If giving – in conferring an obligation to return the gift – implies a form of taking, forgiving would be a form of giving that forsakes this obligation. Because the one who forgives cannot expect to be forgiven in return. (That would not be forgiveness but a bartering with wrongs.)
If two writers use a turn of phrase without it being the case that one is quoting the other, is one still justified in maintaining that there is a relation between their texts? Which is to say, does the accidental recurrence, a recurrence in language alone, warrant scholarly attention?
But given the impossibility of knowing what a writer is thinking of when composing his text, are not even the most well-referenced quotations no more substantive than such random recurrences? Even if the quotation binds the text that quotes to the text that is being quoted, it does not in and of itself prove that the quoting writer has read any more of that text than the sentence, phrase, or even just the word that she quotes – that there is a relation between the quoted and the quoting that is more substantial than the repetition of words.
But is it possible to claim that the only reality of literature is literature itself and at the same time maintain a responsible approach to intellectual labour?
Responsibility implies an acknowledgement that every choice has a consequence in the world – a definition that seems diffuse enough to not be controversial. The choice to see literature as something in the world or arising from the world but not strictly speaking something of this world, a something that occupies a reality of its own, amounts to a withdrawal from the world. The stance I was defending yesterday is one that refuses its own consequences: it turns literature and the criticism it gives birth to into a snake obliviously devouring its own tail, while the world goes about its business around it.
And maybe it would not be too bad to assert that literature is practically and politically useless, moreover, that its beauty stands in an inverse relation to its lack of utility so that the very fact that we have literature even though we do not need it is the best reason for us to carry on reading and writing – maybe such an assertion would not be too bad had it not been that it is only possible to assert this because of certain political conditions that enable certain individuals to concern themselves with the stuff of literature rather than the mere survival.
Which is not to say that we live in an ideal world, but that we live in a world that at least gives us the opportunity to imagine the ideal. And therefore is it not our responsibility, as idealists, to contribute to the maintenance of such a world – at least until we can find a way of improving it?
No work of representational art is really the same as the thing it represents. Which does not mean that realism – understood as the closest possible adherence to what the real is like – cannot or indeed has not attempted to create works of art that represent reality truthfully. The way it really is.
But is it not questionable whether a work that is really like the thing it represents would still be a work of art? Such a work would be like a 1:1 map, but a 1:1 map is no map but simply the landscape mapped. (As in the story by Borges.) Thus if realistic art would aim at representing reality the way it really is, such an art would be striving towards abolishing itself as art.
On the other hand; would not a really and truly realist perception of art, rather than strive to represent reality, seek to show that art as such is not real? Realist art would then be aimed at its own departures from the real.
It does not seem to be the case, generally, that our age suffers from an overly pious relation to its past. On the contrary, people are probably more likely to be surprised at how old a certain phenomenon is (that the Elizabethans knew what a woman’s clitoris is, for instance) than at the thought that our predecessors did not yet know something that for us is common knowledge. This attitude does not make a good foundation for learning from past mistakes. But, more to my present point, if literary scholarship, and the humanities more generally, are to have a purpose, this purpose cannot be separated from an attitude to history. Not only because we primarily study dead people, nor because we serve as the guardians of a canon and hence a tradition (even if the aim of some scholarship is to revise the canon or deconstruct canonicity altogether). Not even because we are well suited to show how each present constructs its past using by and large the same means with which an artist conjures a fictional world, but because the past would not exist without humanistic inquiry.
That is very strongly put. Firstly it elides an important distinction between the past as such and history. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the universe has a past, but only humans have a history; history in the sense of a narrative that puts events into context and offers causal connections and developments between them. Thus, history would not exist without humanistic inquiry. But this still elides a second important qualification. Events that took place, people that lived, trees that grew, have all existed, whether we know about their existence or not. But in order to be present today as something that has existed – as part of history – the event, person, or tree also has to be remembered in some way. Thus, history would not exist without a mode of inquiry whose questioning keeps the no-longer-extant in existance, if only as problem. The purpose of the humanities, then, is neither to recreate the past, nor to conserve it as heritage, but to keep it alive by continually putting it into question. For the same reason, a research question in the humanities has little to do with a research question in the ‘hard sciences.’
The world is weary of the past,
O, might it die or rest at last!
Percy B. Shelley, Hellas (1821).
We have an inclination to excuse authors of the past for opinions that to us appear as unsavoury on account of the unenlightened times that they lived in. So John Milton’s treatment of Eve does not lead us to condemn Paradise Lost as the work of a chauvinistic woman-hater and the racism underlining Aphra Behn’s Oronooko; or, The Royal Slave, A True History is easily set aside by the remarkabe fact of it being a piece of travel fiction published by a woman in 1688. Perhaps the case of Nazism provides a limit case: the revelations that Günter Grass was a member of the Waffen-SS are harder to swallow than, say, Ezra Pound’s support of the Italian fascist regime, whose fervour can, in any case, be assimilated to his radical destruction of the ‘metronome.’ Anyone who was not a direct opponent of the Nazis is still ideologically suspect. And for good reason perhaps, but what of our own complicities? Living in an era that responds to the by now undeniable fact of man-made climate change and the destruction of our planet that it threatens not with a transformation of our energy consumption practices, but with a war on terror that has no clear enemy and hence no projectible end, an era that has redefined human improvement as economic progress, which in its turn seems to increasingly rely upon, rather than counter, the exploitation of those worse off, an era in which refugees stimulate the building of fences and technology is geared towards generating every-better ways of monitoring our private lives for financial gain – in short, what will posterity make of us and our words? If the future manages to improve on its past, will future generations of readers look back on literature written in 2016 and celebrate its aesthetic achievements despite the barbaric times it was written in? Will they excuse us by providing contextual details and arguments about how we primitives could not have known better? Or will they condemn us for not realising the implications of that which is so blatantly in front of our eyes? A purely academic question, of course, given the energy we pour into destroying nothing as efficiently as our own posterity.
In the poetic act which precedes the formal analysis of the field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it. Hayden White, Metahistory.
We live our lives and constantly invent ourselves. We experience events and arrange them in a way that corresponds to how we’ve fashioned ourselves. We read the news, and even if we for a moment assume that these are transparent, objective, and true representations of events, the manner in which we assimilate these news contributes to the image of the world that we have constructed. In each present, the world is built anew.
So is history continually reinvented to suit our present needs. But if Hayden White, in Metahistory, sees this construction as essentially poetic, then it seems that poetry would be at the heart of our relationship to the world. Etymologically, poeisis: making. World-making.
White’s aim is to study the diffrent models for writing history that existed during the nineteenth century (and still form the basis for history-writing). He organises them around their major tropes, modes of emplotment, and political implications. Perhaps most importantly he makes clear how intimate the connection between one’s given conception of history and one’s political position: be it a conservatism based on the idea that we have already arrived at the best political state into which the chaotic matter of humanity can be fashioned or a revolutionism seeking to erase the flawed paths of history to make room for utopia.’There does,’ he writes, ‘appear to be an irreducible ideological component in every historical account of reality.’ This ideological component is related to the poetic one: ideology informs how the historian represents the historical object of analysis, an act of representation that is poetic because it creates the historical object of study. Where a Hegelian constructs the coming-to-self-knowledge of Spirit as the noblest subject of historical investigation, a Marxist sees the forces of production as the elementary materials of history. In either case, the ideological position is inseparable from the poetic act in which the subject of history is constructed and then presented as a subject of historical study.
But if all of historiography boils down to ideological mythopoeia, where does it leave poetry? Does something irreducibly poetic remain, or is all poetry merely the implicit or explicit representation of ethical, political, or ideological standpoints? And could not the irrelevance of poetry proper, as a genre, in our own historical moment be found prefigured within White’s analysis of the poetic nature of historiography? An argument that would suggest that the creative potential of poetry has left the crafting or words and entered other fields: historiography in White’s example, or our perpetial self-fashioning in everyday life. No longer a matter of words, poeisis has become history, and from there on, life itself.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 